Posted
by
samzenpus
on Thursday February 28, 2008 @05:15AM
from the hit-it-hard dept.

djasbestos writes "NASA is planning to smash a spacecraft into the Moon in order to look for hydrogen deposits in the poles. More notably, it will impact with significantly greater force (100x, per the article) than previous Moon collisions, such as by the Lunar Prospector and Smart-1 probes. Admiral Ackbar was unreachable for comment as to the exact location and size of the Moon's thermal exhaust port."

"Beagle 2 was an unsuccessful British landing spacecraft that formed part of the European Space Agency's 2003 Mars Express mission. It is not known for certain that the lander reached the Martian surface; all contact with it was lost upon its separation from the Mars Express six days before its scheduled entry into the atmosphere. It may have missed Mars altogether, skipped off the atmosphere and entered an orbit around the sun, or burned up during its descent. If it reached the

Don't you watch tv? We never landed on the moon. We never made it into space. We obviously didn't shoot down that satellite as it didn't exist. I say, there is no russia either. These conspiracy theorists are weak I say! Weak!!!

Heh, I'd bet all my mod points that you get modded up for this. A: You corrected someone's error B: It was Star Wars related
C: You made fun of someone who thought he was funny, but many people don't.
D: You dead panned it.

It's not going to happen now that you explained it to death, and then picked apart its corpse for good measure.

It's even worse, the OP didn't qoute who he was belittling so now his correction stands out there like a naked British royal, and the horsebeater who replied to that also cuts of his nose to spite his face in laughing at this guy's expense because noone knows what the first guy was talking about. You sir, however, have rightly decimated the second party. I will fall victim to your folly as well, for I am criticizing and commenting without having any context of the original idea put forth for comic value.

Actually the weakness was on both, that's why they went after the second one.. and it was a trap. In fact, the weakness was on all the big craft of the era. Star Destroyers were just as vulnerable to "Trench Run Syndrome" as the Death Stars. Snub starfighters were so successful at taking out large ships using TRS that the Imperial tactic of leaving small ships to planetary defenses had to be changed, thus creating the Lancer-class ships. Kuat Drive Yards designed and developed the first Lancer-class frigate with twenty quad-laser cannon batteries designed specifically for starfighter hunting. Ironically, the Imperial Starfleet found the Lancer-class too expensive for full fleet deployment. A few frigates made it into various fleets, but most admirals preferred to use, and subsequently lose, their TIE starfighters as anti-starfighter options. As a result, most Lancer-class frigates, like smaller ships before them, were assigned to rear guard operations and planetary defense after all.

Umm.. did you miss the part where the Emperor said the second Death Star *wasn't* under construction and that it was all an elaborate trap? I can understand, seeing as he talks like this [insomnia.org] all the time, but it was kind of a big plot point. The second Death Star was identical to the first.. it was built at the same time as the first.. the Emperor just wanted the Rebels to think it was built in response to the first being destroyed.

"Rather than rely on thermal exhaust ports to vent the reactor's incredible excess heat, the second Death Star would instead funnel the waste energy through a series of millimeter-wide heat dispersion ducts."-Starwars.com, http://www.starwars.com/databank/location/deathstarii/ [starwars.com]

I am planning on failing my midterms. I expect to fail this midterm by significantly more points (100x per my plans) than previous failures. I am doing this in search of hydrogen deposits in the poles.

For the same reason we send rover to Mars instead of just looking at the planet from above with satellites I suppose...I bet it wouldn't cost a single million dollar to build the rover (sending it to the moon could be an other matter thought. And I mean sending it so it can work once arrived. Craters don't count here... But maybe you can group some stuff in the rocket to divide the cost.)

Anyway, if the hydrogen is under the surface, rover won't do the job. The Dumb mass can do it and is much cheaper so...

This is Slashdot, so I better get a good old tradition out of the way before someone else does I suppose...

NASA officials has released a press statement saying the spacecraft will not require any special programming to direct it towards a collision with the Moon. They simply plan to install Windows Vista on the craft and let nature take its course.

Your information is out of date. In simulations Vista slowed the machine down so badly by the time it got up enough speed to crash the moon was out of alignment. In light of these simulations (and do to budget constraints) they have decided to go with plan b-which will consist of a robotic arm plugging a usb scanner into the underlying Windows 98 operating system at the appropriate time. This will result in further savings in hardware and fuel by lowering the system requirements from "need a second mortgage elite" to "cousin cleetus wally world special".

For further information please see the paper entitled "Using complex instability for positive gain: The use of underlying instabilities inherent in proprietary operating systems with undocumented functions to achieve net gains in proposed Unmanned Procedurally Programmed Missions for Interstellar Scientific Study (UPPMISS) " at NASA.gov

If there's anything that would get the public interested in space, it would be something like this. Why aren't they soliciting the public to name THIS noble craft? But I shouldn't kid myself: to really capture general interest, it would be needed to launch many crafts to bore holes such that, viewed from Earth, a person's name were to be spelled out. "Come," we could shout, "be the person to be remembered forever as having put the first and surely forever largest man-made eyesore upon the moon!"

If this impact contaminates a significant proportion of the water reserves on the moon than they're not worth the trouble anyway. But in all reality that would be like me saying that if we did a test in Pittsburgh would it contaminate the waters in Dallas? It simply of such a small scale effect against such a massive landscape that it's pretty much unthinkable.

It simply of such a small scale effect against such a massive landscape that it's pretty much unthinkable.

It is peculated that only creators at the south pole who's depths are in permanent shadow may contain water ice. How many creators would that be, anyhow? - after this test - one less - whatever the count!

The disappearance of the Mars Polar Lander in December concluded a year of major failures for Nasa.
The lander vanished less than three months after Nasa lost its sister spacecraft, the Mars Climate Orbiter, in highly-embarrassing circumstances.
The $125m craft, which was to study the Red Planet's climate, went missing on 23 September after a mix-up between imperial and metric measurements

You may laugh, but NASA did do it before. During the final Apollo missions, they allowed the (abandoned) lunar module to crash into the moon in order to test seismic readings on the instruments left behind.

They also smashed the third stage of the Saturn V into the Moon for every Apollo after 13 IIRC, also as seismic probes. That hadconsiderably more kinetic energy than either the LEM upper stages or any of the recent impacts.

It wasn't just to test the seismometers, it was to map the interior of the Moon, once they found out that the Moon is seismically pretty quiet and doesn't have much in the way of Moonquakes. It was thus a very large scale example of the seismic prospecting that is done frequently in oil exploration.

I would have thought it was a (slightly tasteless) joke. This guy "Admiral Ackbar" sounds an awful lot like "Allahu Akbar", which some people, I imagine, might be shouting as they crash flying machines in to things.

Toby Ziegler: They know it was on course traveling at a rate of 15,400 miles per hour, which it was supposed to. Somewhere during its descent it was also supposed to release two probes - each about the size of a basketball - firing them deep into the ground as part of the mission's search for evidence of water under surface.

Josh Lyman: We think if we hit the ground hard enough, we can make it to the center of the planet and find water?

Toby Ziegler: Yeah.

Josh Lyman: That's not a theory of physics pretty much disproved by Wile E. Coyote?

Is NASA so angry at not being able to visit for 30+ years that they're lashing out at their mistress now? Or is this just a game of interplanetary darts? NASA's so rusty at this game, the Chinese ought to watch out that their manned expedition isn't hit by mistake.

A small red spacecraft breaks through the cloud cover of Mysterio system planet 6! At the controls, it's none other than our fearless hero, Spaceman Spiff! Piloting over the lifeless world, he reflects on his unusual mission...QUIZ1. 6+5=...to somehoe crash planets 6 and 5 together!

In a scientific mission to discover what happens when two planets collide, Spaceman Spiff drops anchor! The anchor catches on a hillside! Spiff downshifts and guns the motor! Imperceptibly at first, the planet slowly moves, towe

Too bad we turned off the Apollo ALSEP package, the seismometer experiments. I had the joy of working with the data team, and on one of the lunar missions they crashed the Apollo S4-B stage into the moon. The seismic event lasted for an hour. The moon is a homogeneous sphere, no core.

The distance from the moon to the earth is so astronomical (no pun intended) that this is a fairly mild concern. The real problem arises when debris is in orbit, otherwise it's just another shooting star. Kicking rock out with such force that it makes it to earth makes it unlikely that it could maintain an orbit. These kinds of collisions have been going on for eons and we're still not surrounded with rocks from the moon. The difference is that this one is man made.